This is mostly due to incorrect billing, confusing fees, unexpected charges, and deceptive contracts. These can certainly add up, but I was shocked to learn that the most significant — even devastating — monetary damage can occur when your cell phone is lost or stolen.

A $26,000 Cell Phone Bill

A recent CBS 5 ConsumerWatch report by Jeanette Pavini profiles the plights of three consumers in California — all of whom had their cell phones stolen and were left stuck with a huge bill for unauthorized charges.

The report told the story of San Francisco resident Wendy Nguyen, who was shocked to receive a bill for $26,000 after her cell phone was unknowingly stolen before she left for an overseas vacation. Cingular held her responsible for charges incurred after the phone was taken, up until the time Wendy discovered the theft and called the carrier.

She was able to prove via airline and passport documents that she was out of the country and couldn’t possibly have made the unauthorized calls from San Francisco during that time, but Cingular still held Wendy accountable for all charges.

Not only that, they advised Wendy that if she couldn’t pay the bill she should consider filing for bankruptcy!

Adding Insult to Injury

Eileen Perrera’s story revealed what happened after her phone was stolen while she was on vacation. She filed a police report and contacted Sprint immediately, but then received a bill totaling almost $16,000. Sprint claimed to have never received the call from her reporting the stolen cell phone.

Eileen was able to submit proof from landline phone records that she had indeed called Sprint customer service. As her late fees piled up, the situation remained unresolved for months.

Then there’s Pamela Woodson’s story. As revealed in the CBS 5 ConsumerWatch report, when Pamela’s cell phone was stolen she reported it the very next day. However, by that time her account had already incurred over $1,800 in unauthorized charges. Due to the suspicious nature of the fraudulent charges, she was actually interviewed by the FBI — and cleared of all responsibility. Nevertheless, T-Mobile pressed on, insisting she pay the outstanding charges in addition to late fees and interest.

Can This Be Legal?

If you dig through all the fine print in your cell phone contract, you’ll most likely discover a statement that reads something like this: “Should your cell phone be lost or stolen you are responsible for any costs incurred for unauthorized calls made prior to reporting the cell phone missing.”

Unlike a credit card, cellular contracts are not required to limit liability for fraudulent charges. But it’s also important to realize that the extent of your liability as stated in your contract is your provider’s policy — it’s not a law.

The laws that give consumers the right to dispute unauthorized charges vary from state to state. In states where the laws do exist, they’re not doing much good because there’s no single independent agency set up to review evidence, enforce the laws, and provide a timely resolution.

Why? It all comes down to money. In California, for instance, the significant financial contributions made by the wireless industry to state government gives the telecommunications industry enormous influence over entities like the Public Utilities Commission. In effect, this allows the wireless industry to make up its own rules.

Avoiding and Responding to a Theft

Are we at the mercy of an unregulated industry that’s free of consequences and penalties? Not if we learn how to defend ourselves.

This year, an estimated 600,000 cell phones will be reported lost or stolen. Here are the 10 things you need to know to protect yourself from cell phone theft and fraudulent charges:

1. Guard your cell phone like you would your wallet.

Yes, this is obvious advice, but frankly the best way to not get stuck with fraudulent charges is to do what you can to prevent unauthorized calls in the first place.

On a related note, think twice about what information you store on your device. A stolen cell phone can not only lead to a huge bill, but to identity theft as well.

2. Password-protect your device.

Check the user guide that came with your phone and start using the “lock” or “password” feature to potentially prevent a thief from making unauthorized calls. There are ways to override passwords, but at the very least you might be buying yourself some time until you discover the loss and call your provider.

3. Don’t be fooled by cell phone insurance.

Purchasing cell phone insurance will provide coverage for the device itself, but it won’t protect you against charges for unauthorized calls.

4. Call your cell phone provider as soon as you discover the loss.

Report your missing device, and be sure to keep meticulous records including the date and time you called your carrier, the name and ID number of the representative to whom you spoke, and what you were told.

Also note the state or region of their call center, plus their telephone extension number. Finally, ask for confirmation in writing that your device has been disabled. Some companies can even email this to you.

5. File a police report.

This may not help your chances of getting the stolen phone back, but it still provides an official record of the crime. Your carrier may even require the police report number when you phone in the loss.

6. Open an investigation with your carrier if necessary.

If you find that you’re not getting an immediate resolution by working directly with your cell phone company, don’t waste another minute. Call your carrier and request an investigation, then follow up in writing. Generally, requesting an investigation gives you a better chance of preventing any formal collections action to be taken and should also delay reporting to any of the credit bureaus.

When you request an investigation, advise your carrier that you’ll be filing a complaint with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), your state attorney general’s office, and your state’s public utility commission (PUC). Your carrier is more likely to pay closer attention to you when they know you’re an informed consumer.

According to a 2006 AARP/Roper cell phone survey (of adults 18 and over) 48 percent reported not knowing who to call in the event their cell phone carrier could not resolve a billing or service problem to their satisfaction. Items 7 through 9 below shed some light.

7. Contact the FCC.

The FCC will forward your complaint to your service provider, requiring a response from them within 30 days. You can contact them via their web site or call them directly at (888) 225-5322.

8. Contact your state attorney general’s office.

According to ConsumersUnion.org, state attorney general offices will handle complaints about cell phone fraud and contract disputes. This office has filed lawsuits against wireless companies based on consumer complaints, resulting in refunds to consumers and agreements by some companies to reform certain practices.

Find the contact information for your state attorney general’s office here.

9. Contact your state’s PUC.

Each state has a government agency, usually called a public utility commission, that oversees telephone companies. To locate your state’s PUC online and to file a complaint, visit the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners web site.

10. When all else fails, contact the media.

The wireless companies are particularly adverse to negative media attention, so until effective laws are put into place you may have to resort to contacting your local TV station.

In Wendy, Pamela, and Eileen’s cases that’s just what they did, and their stories all have happy endings. After many months of persistent determination and followup, all fraudulent charges were dropped. It seems the wireless industry wants to do the right thing after all — as long as they’re forced to by the media.

Ultimately, CBS 5 ConsumerWatch played a huge role in getting each situation resolved. But don’t be tempted to skip steps 7 through 9. The FCC, state attorney generals offices, and PUCs all need to see how serious a problem this is, so formal complaints serve an important purpose.

box.net
DropBoks
eSnips
MediaMax
OmniDrive
openomy

There was a time when the computing world thought the future was internet-connected, diskless appliances, which itself harked back to the really old days of terminal computing, except with the advantage of connecting to a worldwide network and all the resources of the web. These never took off, though Tablet PCs are sort of their heirs. The services we review here are one attempt not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, maintaining the notion that internet-bases storage is a good thing, though not as your only storage.

One advantage of online storage is that it’s mostly platform-independent: You can access it through any computer with a web browser. And many of these services go beyond mere storage, offering application functionality such as the ability to lightly edit pictures and documents. With all these services, you’ll get at least a gigabyte of free space, which you can use for those files you want anywhere-access to, ones you want backed up on a secure offsite server, or just ones that you don’t want to take up your precious local disk space with. Read on to find out what you can do with online storage today
box.net

The creators of box.net started out with the lofty goal of making physical storage devices obsolete. One of the more Web 2.0-looking services, box.net gives you 1GB storage and 10GB/mo. bandwidth in its free account. This also includes file sharing and blog posting, but not mobile access, zip folders, or phone support. For added security, an SSL version is available by using https:// in the URL. The higher grades of service not only get you more storage, but more bandwidth per month, phone support, subaccounts, and ZIP folders.
DropBoks

DropBoks is simplicity itself: A page with a box that you upload files onto:

The service offers 1GB of free storage, with a maximum file size of 50MB, and there are no monthly fee plans or even on-page ads. Instead DropBoks depends on the kindness of users who like the service to make donations. We had no problem running DropBoks on either Firefox or Internet Explorer.

When you log in, DropBoks switches to SSL mode, and indeed when we did so, IE7 reported the connection as encrypted. You can upload more than one file at a time by clicking on the plus sign and browsing to another file.

You can double-click file entries in DropBoks’s list to launch them, just as though they were in a directory on your PC. Though you can’t simply drag a file icon onto the service’s window to upload, you can drag file entries to a trash icon on the page to delete them. There are no subfolders, just the one main one.

Currently DropBoks has no sharing capabilities, but the company claims to be working on adding this. They’re also considering larger storage amounts for pay. But we find its beauty in its simplicity. Continued…

Product: DropBoks

Company: DropBoks

Price: Free, includes 1GB storage, with a max file size of 50MB. No maximum transfer amount specified.

Pros: Super simple; security.

Cons: No subfolders; no drag and drop; well, no bells or whistles of any kind.

Summary: We love the simplicity of DropBoks and its lack of ads, though drag-and-drop file uploading would be nice. If you don’t have huge media files but just want quick and easy access to data up- and downloading, it works.

Registration is a simple matter of entering a valid email and password choice. When first creating a folder, we couldn’t simply drag and drop a file from the desktop onto it to upload it, but when you choose Upload Folders, there’s a Method choice between add files and drag and drop. When you click the latter for the first time, a Java applet is downloaded, giving you a square window into which you can drop your file icons.

There’s also an Add button in the box, which brings up a regular folder dialog for you to pick files to upload. From either method, we could upload entire directories as well as individual files. The Download Folder choice is only available to paid accounts, which start at $4.99 a month. When you do download a folder, box.net zips it up, and the subfolder structure is preserved when you unzip it.

In all, it’s an interface that manages to hide a lot of functionality in a simple-looking, pleasing presentation:

box.net’s tagging feature lets you sort related files and create widgets based on the tags. And its help page is…well…helpful and thorough.

Sharing files is a matter of merely entering the email of the person you want to share a file or folder with and sending it off. The recipient has to sign up with box.net, however, to get the file. A Public Box feature lets you assign a URL to a file that will be accessible to anyone on the web, and this can be used as an RSS feed as well.

A differentiating feature of box.net is its widget, which you can put on your MySpace page or blog to allow visitors to upload and download files with a drag and a drop. The widget consists of code that uses Flash for the folder that you place into any web page’s HTML file:

Finally in sharing options, we successfully added a downloadable file to our LiveJournal blog with a simple menu choice, after setting up the entry for it in box.net.

When we uploaded a test 7.5MB file, it took 3 minutes and 52 seconds on our home DSL connection but less than 30 seconds at the very fast work connection. And the service reported the file as being 8.8MB although the local PC called it 7.5MB. (Since these results vary depending on your connection, we merely report them for this first service as examples; we won’t be comparatively timing all the services.)

The site states that “box.net supports Internet Explorer 6-7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5-2.0, Opera 9, and Safari.” We ran into an occasional rendering problem in Internet Explorer 7, where the screen contents would shift to the left and text was bunched up, but moving the mouse fixed that. Some overlapping of text shows up in a Firefox 2.0.0.1 rendering error, too, but neither of these interfere with using the service.

box.net is a good-looking, easy-to-use service, but we wish sharing files with it didn’t require a signup, and that the browser rendering errors should be fixed. Continued…

Product: box.net

Company: box.net

Price: Free for up to 1GB storage, max file size 10MB, 10GB transfer/mo.; Premium $4.99/mo. for 5GB, 1GB max file size, 20GB transfer/mo., 3 subaccounts; Pro $9.99/mo. for 15GB, max file size 1GB, 50GB transfer/mo., 10 subaccounts.

Pros: Pleasant interface; drag-and-drop uploading; has subfolders which are preserved when downloaded in zip form; free option; good sharing capabilities; blog integration.

Cons: Slight rendering errors in Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox; no specifically media-file-related tools or apps; sharing files requires recipient to register.

Summary: box.net is a good looking, affordable online storage service with a simple-to-use interface and strong file sharing features.

eSnips

eSnips is all about sharing your digital content, sort of a Flickr for everything, not just photos. The service, still in beta, has 16 “communities” for things like Karaoke, Design, and Paranormal. So you could also think of it as a cross between online storage and MySpace; the company itself refers to the service as “social content-sharing site.” For each of its communities, there’s a portal page with a cool design and top and featured content—music files, images, video, or documents—whatever’s relevant for the category. Like Flickr, tagging and discovery is a big part of it.

Uploading is one file at a time, using a standard browse window. Any file you upload can be made publicly viewable, via the “Share with the world” option. You can’t create subfolders under any folder. The eSnips uploader toolbar sets this service apart from the others, offering a convenient way to upload and access your account from your web browser. It supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Netscape, and lets you upload an entire folder at once, but there’s no drag-and-drop or local folder integration with the service.

The toolbar, as you can see, gives you quick access to just about all eSnips’s services, and throws in a voice recorder and video creation software.

You start out with private folders for business files, home videos, web research, and Other. You can add Shared folders, but you can’t create subfolders under the preset ones.

eSnips Folders

Though the main thrust of eSnips is to share and discover digital content, it also lets you upload and store private files for your use only. And not only are there ways for you to make yourself and your art discoverable on eSnips, but you can even sell content through it.

An extensive Profile page is one tool eSnips offers for you to get discovered by other users.

Another way is by using its Invite page to send links to your public folders:

There’s also a screen capture tool that will resize an image for quicker web loading. We had no problem running eSnips in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, and saw no rendering errors in either. If you’re looking for a way to store, share, and even sell your digital content, eSnips gives you the means. Continued…

Product: eSnips

Company: eSnips

Price: Free, includes 1GB storage.

Pros: Browser toolbar, lots of community/social networking tools, selling capability.

Cons: No drag-and-drop uploading; 1GB max storage space.

Summary: A cross between MySpace and online storage, eSnips offers a nice way to share or even sell your digital creations to a community of users, and by the way, offers 1GB of online storage for any file types you want.

MediaMax

Streamload’s MediaMax online storage service is more geared towards, as the name implies, storing and accessing media files online. The free version gives you 25GB——quite a large amount compared with most services.

Signing up is a simple matter of choosing a username and password, entering a valid email address, and entering the text in the swirly graphic. You’re first brought to a page with clear help links to teach you about all MediaMax’s procedures and capabilities:

Note that we didn’t see anything about security or SSL in the help.

In addition to the expected file manager, MediaMax includes specific features for videos, photos, music, and mail—for sending links to your files to others.

Uploading is accomplished by clicking the Upload button, browsing for a file with the regular Windows dialog, and entering one file at a time. You can’t select multiple files or directories with this method, but you can do this with the Multi-File Upload option, which includes a drag-and-drop feature and the ability to upload entire folders. Like box.net, this is a Java window in Firefox and an ActiveX control in Internet Explorer, but it’s right on the page rather than a separate dialog box:

When we tried to upload a two-level deep directory, we got a warning dialog that the content’s digital signature had an error, and then a Not Responding hang, even on our fast workplace connection. Then when we closed that and logged in again, only the second-level directory was uploaded. This happened in both Firefox and IE7. If you upload the same file more than once, a number is appended to its name. You can create many sublevels of folders; we stopped at six.

Another way to upload is by using the beta MediaMax XL software, which presents both a directory tree and a drag-and-drop area:

It also lets you sync folders on your PC with your MediaMax account.

Uploading in the media-specific pages is identical to doing so in the file manager, but how the files are displayed is different, tagging is an option for photos and video, and the service gives you a way to play the content right over the web:

The photo view shows thumbnails and lets you add captions and tags, create Albums, send pictures via email, and rotate images. The service offers to scale photos down in size for downloading, as well as letting you download the original size image. The picture email feature lets you send multiple shots and choose whether to send them as attachments or as links to a page showing the picture. If you use the latter method, you can require a password for getting to the page and optionally set an expiration date for the page. For your recipients to get the photos, however, they need to sign up for a MediaMax account, and the picture appears in their main directory. We feel this could be better done—and is with other options like Yahoo! Photos.

MediaMax also includes a hosting feature, whereby you get a URL in the form http://www.mediamax.com/your_username. Anything you place in your Hosted directory will be available on this page. It would be nice if you could drag the files within the file manager; you have to go through a dialog (and choose a little checkbox if you want to just copy instead of move) to accomplish this. Another thing we’d like to have seen is a way to password-protect your hosting page. Otherwise, this feature can give you a useful way to get your images up on Craiglist, eBay, or a blog.

The Music Locker can organize your tunes by artist, but not by album. It also reports the bit rate of your songs. If you click Play, it will open your default music playing software and stream the songs from the web. Finally, you can edit the title, artist, album, and genre entries for each song.

We like MediaMax’s generous 25GB of free storage, and it offers a full range of sharing and media conveniences, but there are some quirks that need to be corrected, and the interface operation could stand some simplification. Continued…

Product: MediaMax

Company: Streamload

Price: Free for 25GB, 1GB transfer/mo., max file size 10MB; Premium, $4.95/mo. for 100GB, 10GB transfer/mo., unlimited file size; Elite, $9.95/mo. for 250GB/25GB transfer; Professional, $29.95/mo. for 1000GB/100GB transfer/mo.

Pros: Large amount of free storage—25GB; subfolder capability.

Cons: No subaccounts; interface a bit busy and often requires more dialog interactions than seem necessary; could have more media playing/editing features.

Summary: 25GB is a lot of storage for free, and MediaMax gives you a way to organize and access your data from anywhere. We found the interface slightly convoluted, though not really bad, and would like to see more security options.

OmniDrive

OmniDrive claims the speed of desktop storage, which seems an odd claim, with internet connections so varied in speed. Part of this claim stems from the service’s use of locally installed client software that makes files accessible from any application, mimicking local storage. Another outstanding advantage of OmniDrive is that it has integrated Zoho Writer so that you can edit Word Documents without needing installed software; similar support for spreadsheets and presentations is in the works. The service is currently in beta.

OmniDrive’s main web interface shows your directory structure on the left, and files in the main area can be displayed as thumbnails, large icons, or a details list:

Free accounts get a gigabyte of storage with 5GB transfer per month and no limit on the size of files. An advanced uploader gives you that Java-based file upload area we’ve seen in other services. You can’t upload intact folder structures this way; if you drag a folder onto the area, its contained files will appear, but if you upload with this tool’s file browser, you can upload a directory and preserve its subdirectory structure.

As with MediaMax, you can drag files in the browser window to a trash icon to delete them. In a step beyond, you can use drag and drop to move files among folders.

A slideshow with gallery is a nice touch, and you can run it in full-screen mode, though it still doesn’t rival something like Picasa. OmniDrive will also play MP3 files with a built-in player so you don’t even have to download the music files. The player even has level bars:

But it won’t play WMA or iPod music, even though the player lists those files.

You can make folders private, publish them, or download them as ZIP files. And if you install the local client software, the right-click menu in your Explorer folders will let you make a file available on the web with a single click. When you share a file through email, the recipient just clicks on the link to download the file, without having to register with or even visit OmniDrive’s web site. When we right-clicked a file to “publish” it, the web app looked like it was working, but then we weren’t clearly told the URL for our published file. Right clicking on the file’s icon showed the URL, however.

As mentioned earlier, if you install OmniDrive’s client software (available in Windows; a Mac version is in private beta), your right-click context menus will have an added OmniDrive choice, which offers to upload the selected file or folder to your OmniDrive account or to publish it on a web page. The installed software also give you a QuickLaunch icon that opens a local-looking “Live Folder” of your online files—pretty cool trick, actually.

But all is not sun and roses: We got an error when we tried using the right-click upload feature to upload a network directory, and when we tried publishing a file, we got a dialog stating that our request was in queue, but then nothing happened. If you make the browser window too narrow while in Details view, text on the right spills on top of text on the left. Another very minor quibble is that you can’t set the web interface to remember you to avoid going through the login page every time.

Finally, OmniDrive has an open API for developers to make use of its web services in their programs. There’s a wiki that documents how programmers can take advantage of this.

Though there are still some kinks that need ironing out, OmniDrive nevertheless promises to be a cool and useful service. Continued…

Product: OmniDrive

Company: OmniDrive

Price: Free for 1GB of storage, 5GB of bandwidth unlimited file size API access; Pro Package 1 $40/year for 10GB storage, 20GB bandwidth/mo., unlimited file size; Pro Package 2, $99/year for 25GB storage, 50GB bandwidth/mo. Pro Package 3, $199/year for 50GB storage, 100GB bandwidth/mo.

Pros: Slick interface; integration with Zoho Office for online document editing; drag-and-drop uploading; multiple folder levels; unlimited file size; integration with Windows Explorer; open API for developers.

Cons: A few bugs; drag and drop could be clearer and simpler; client install could be more straightforward; web interface can’t remember login.

Summary: OmniDrive brings two special extras to the online storage party: the inclusion of online editing tools from Zoho Office and integration with the Windows shell, allowing you to right click to upload files and folders and to see your online folder as a local one. The one caveat would be some bugs we ran into in using some of these shell extension features; it should be noted that the service is at this point still in beta.

openomy

The eye-candy free, bare bones looking openomy calls itself an “online file system.” Despite this designation, the service doesn’t support subfolder levels, but instead relies on tags to organize your files. It’s completely free, with 1GB of storage for everyone, now; premium plans are in the offing. openomy has a strong developer orientation, with an open API to integrate their web apps with the service. An example is an app that lets you publish your tags as RSS feeds. The main menu even has choices for Applications You’ve Authorized, Applications You’ve Created, and Create Application.

Uploading is one file at a time, with no drag or drop. When you upload a file, it’s a good idea to fill in some tags in the text box below the filename entry.

After you’ve successfully uploaded a file, it’s super simple to create a permalink for it, which anyone can access. And they don’t need to register for the service or even visit the openomy site: A simple download dialog appears when they click on the link.

One nice, if obvious, touch, is the inclusion of Search, which a lot of other services reviewed here surprisingly don’t offer. But since the File Manager has no list view of your files, the Search feature turns out to be essential. We were a little surprised that the search feature doesn’t search based on tags, but just on filename text.

A public files option includes virus scanning before the file will actually be made public.

An interesting side project of the service is Pageflakes, a neat, clean, customizable portal.

Though it’s a nice tool for developers, average users will probably want something with a slicker interface. openomy worked fine in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, but at times uploading was slower than for other services. Continued…

Product: openomy

Company: openomy

Price: Free with 1GB and 10GB bandwidth.

Pros: Open API; tagging.

Cons: No subfolders; Spartan look; no drag-and-drop upload; uploading slow at time.

Summary: Bare-bones online storage that makes heavy use of tagging and that’s geared towards developers who want to integrate their web apps with online storage and tagging.

Final Thoughts

If you’re running low on hard disk space, and just need somewhere to store nonessential files, or if you have a need to access your files from different computers in different locations, these services are a welcomed relief. Other key reasons to use them are to share documents with others around the web and to back up those precious memories stored in media files against the possibility of a local disk crash. And if you don’t have a huge library of files, the free space of at least 1GB offered by all these services won’t cost you a dime.

All of these services reliably stored our test files, without any evidence of file corruption. The trend was for services that offered more advanced features to be more quirky and at times even buggy. If you just want no frills storage, choose DropBoks or openomy. If you need subfolders and would like a prettier interface, look into box.net.

One thing we missed in many of these services was actual OS integration—with the sole exception of OmniDrive, which lets you upload files via a right-click option in Windows Explorer. Some of the other services, such as openomy and box.net do allow developers to build such functionality.

If your files are very confidential, you should probably stay away from online storage. Online storage could also be something to avoid if you’re a serious digital photographer who has a large collection of multi-megabyte RAW files or if you store and want quick access to high-quality audio or video files. It all depends on the upload speed of your internet connection; for those with low-end DSL connections, it’s not a great idea to store huge media files online, but if you’re a business or if you just pay a lot for a faster connection, you may as well go for it.

box.net DropBoks eSnips MediaMax OmniDrive openomy

Free storage/ Bandwidth/ max file size 1GB/10GB/ 10MB 1GB/unknown/ 50MB 1GB/unknown/ unknown 25GB/1GB/ unlimited 1GB/5GB/ unlimited 1GB/10GB/ unknown

Drag-and-drop Yes No No Yes Yes No

Subfolders Yes No No Yes Yes No

Tags Yes No Yes Yes No Yes

Extra features Web page widget; RSS. Nada. Tons of community features; toolbar for easy access; selling option. Image viewer; media players with streaming; sharing tools; albums. Windows Explorer integration; Zoho online editor; email sharing. Search; RSS.

That’s the question posed at Macenstein, which ran tests comparing the Apple browser to the popular Firefox software.

The article’s author tested his Mac by conducting a series of tasks using both browsers. He claims that the computer performed the tasks significantly slower when Safari was open, compared to when Firefox was open.

The news quickly spread among the Mac faithful, who are trying to replicate the results and figure out what is going on.

Blog community response:

“At the end of the day, no one is really sure why Apple’s browser is making so many waves in the performance pool, but a healthy comment thread on the post is already hard at work. For anyone serious about Safari, here’s hoping Apple is already aware of the issue and has brought their browser in line for Leopard.”
–The Unofficial Apple Weblog

“Interesting analysis, wonder if there is a conspiracy theory, or this is something to do with the HTML / Javascript rendering system being deeply embedded in the operating system. It’d be interesting to see a similar study of IE vs Firefox on Windows, and sites with heaving javascript / flash vs static HTML.”
–Ufies.org

“1) Browsers rarely get served the same content, even on very popular sites. Without spoofing it’s hard to know if Safari is being served some buggy content from one of the pages in question. (2) A small sample set isn’t enough to draw general conclusions. Try a bunch of other different Web sites and see if a slowdown still occurs. If so, then maybe there is a systemic problem. Until then, though, all we know is that something is hogging CPU in one of five Web pages. (3) Reduce reduce reduce! Reduce the problem if possible. Cut it down to one page. Don’t go back/forward (just go right to the pages instead of clicking through to them).”

As digital evidence increases in importance, authorities seize anything that can hold data. This includes computers, CDs, USB keys, MP3 players, cell phones and game consoles, Jim Christy, a director of the U.S. Department of Defense Cyber Crime Center, said in a presentation at the Black Hat DC Briefings & Training event here.

Jim Christy “This is everything that you got and gave for Christmas,” Christy said. In one case, investigators found child pornography on a modified Xbox, he said. “The challenge is that with digital proliferation, the data volume is tremendous these days.”

A single terabyte of data equals about 8,333 old-fashioned, five-drawer file cabinets filled with papers. “That’s an awful lot for an examiner to go through,” Christy said.

Digital evidence can answer key questions in a legal case, but efficient tools to sift through massive amounts of data don’t exist today, Christy said. “I want to call out to the industry to create tools to help us investigate large volumes of data in a forensic manner,” he said.

Cybercrime investigators need more tools because they are stretched thin. There are only about a dozen accredited digital-forensics labs in the United States. While it may appear differently on popular TV police dramas, digital evidence is used in many more cases than DNA analysis, for example, which appears in only 1 percent of U.S. criminal cases, Christy said.

Now Random House has announced that it, too, is making excerpts of books available online — but it’s just excerpts and of just a few books. The question, really, is why bother? All these publishers are creating limited, expensive, fragmented searches for books, when Google (and others such as Yahoo and Amazon) are more than willing to do the work for them, while bringing all the offerings together. There are very, very few people in this world who think about books in terms of who published them. No one wants to know that they need to go to a certain place to search for a Random House book and another for a HarperCollins book. Instead, let the search engines do the work (and spend the money), and the search engines will bring in the people and help drive sales. Building separate, fragmented book searches hardly seems like a compelling or cost-effective plan.

Dow Jones & Co., the media company that manages the well-known index of 30 blue chip stocks, said it discovered shortly before 2 p.m. that its computers weren’t properly handling the day’s huge volume in trades at the New York Stock Exchange.

It switched to a backup computer, and the result was a massive swoon in the index as the secondary system took over processing shortly before 3 p.m.

The Dow plunged about 200 points almost instantly, and was down as much as 546 points - its worst single-session decline in more than five years, and one that sent the blue chips into negative territory for the year.

“I’ve never seen a collapse like that, and I’ve only been doing this for 47 years,” said Alfred E. Goldman, chief market strategist at A.G. Edwards & Sons Inc.

The heavy volume of some 4.5 billion trades, almost double the average, came on a day in which investors worldwide were rattled by a nearly 9 percent drop in Chinese stocks overnight. Investors, draped in concerns that stocks were overvalued and that economic weakness was at hand, began crying “sell” from the outset.

“The market’s extraordinary trading volume caused a delay in the Dow Jones data systems,” said Dow Jones spokeswoman Sybille Reitz. “We decided to switch over to the backup system, and the result was a rapid catch-up in the published value of the Dow Jones industrial average.”

The sheer number of sell orders caused a bottleneck, where some traders reported that systems were slow to respond.

Despite the delays, the closing prices on Tuesday were accurate, the exchanges said.

The NYSE said none of the delays were related to its hybrid trading system, which combines trades executed by floor brokers with those that are fully automated. The Big Board suspended its electronic platform to bring about an orderly close, and reverted trading to floor brokers.

A spokesman said the exchange expects an orderly opening on Wednesday.

The Dow closed down 416.02, or 3.29 percent, at 12,216.24; the Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 50.33, or 3.47 percent, to 1,399.04; and the tech-dominated Nasdaq composite index was off 96.66, or 3.86 percent, at 2,407.86.

“It was literally seconds. I had never seen anything like that before,” said Ryan Larson, senior equity trader at Voyager Asset Management, a subsidiary of RBC Dain Rauscher. “The nature of a trader is you’re very skeptical of everything. I just needed to find to find out that it was real.”

To the chagrin of many investors, the drop was indeed real.

Todd Leone, managing director of equity trading at Cowen & Co., said trading became difficult.

“Some of the books froze up,” he said, referring to the systems in which traders place their orders. “You couldn’t really trade. You couldn’t really make sales.” He said orders appeared to become backed up. “Once they unfroze the Dow fell.”

There are safeguards to keep such pullbacks from getting out of hand.

One measure, known as trading collars, kicked into effect Tuesday shortly after 1 p.m. when the New York Stock Exchange Composite index lost more than 180 points. That index ended the day down 342.03 points, or 3.6 percent.

The collars put a chokehold on certain orders, forbidding transactions that capitalize on discrepancies in prices.

There are also more draconian measures that weren’t invoked Tuesday. Known as “circuit breakers,” these safeguards force traders to take a time-out. The Big Board developed these measures following the October 1987 crash and a mini-crash in October 1989.

The drop Tuesday, however unnerving, wasn’t the 1,250 point decline in the Dow industrials that would’ve been required to suspend trading. While the rules vary depending on the time of day and the severity of the drop, the exchange can halt trading for as little as a half hour to two hours, or in some cases, end the day’s session early.

Alcatel-Lucent isn’t the only winner in a federal jury’s $1.52 billion patent infringement award against Microsoft this week. Other beneficiaries are the many rivals to the MP3 audio-compression format.

Backers of alternative formats have sought for years to replace MP3, which offers relatively lower quality sound than next-generation technologies — including the nominal successor to MP3 itself, MP3Pro. Apple uses the MPEG industry standard, AAC; Microsoft uses its proprietary Windows Media format; and Sony has developed its own, largely ignored flavor. Open-source, royalty-free options, such as Ogg Vorbis, remain dark horse competitors. But none have displaced MP3, the first and most widely adopted format of all.

Now, with a cloud over the de facto industry standard, companies that rely on MP3 may finally have sufficient motivation to move on. And that raises some tantalizing possibilities, including a real long shot: Open-source, royalty-free formats win.

It’s not immediately clear what the implications of Thursday’s judgment are for other MP3 licensees, which include hundreds of companies who already pay royalties to Fraunhofer/Thomson — previously accepted as the only licensor of MP3 technology.

Microsoft has 1.52 billion reasons to paint this as a disaster, not only for itself but for the entire industry. So says Tom Burt, Microsoft’s corporate vice president and deputy general counsel.

“If this verdict is allowed to stand, companies will have to make hard choices about whether to continue to offer MP3 technology,” he said in a statement sent to Wired News late Thursday. Licensees would have to “pay twice for the same technology — one standard charge to the industry-recognized licensee of MP3 (Fraunhofer/Thomson), and again, an unprecedented amount to Alcatel-Lucent.”

In truth, nothing has yet been decided. Microsoft plans to ask the judge to reduce the damage award and will appeal, according to a source close to the matter, so the ruling could yet be overturned or limited. On Thursday, an attorney for Alcatel-Lucent would not rule out the possibility of an all-out licensing campaign should the verdict stand; but he also acknowledged that the long-term result is very much up in the air.

“It wouldn’t make sense to start suing everyone else until this case is resolved on the merits,” said John Desmarais of Kirkland & Ellis.

Although Thomson is widely accepted as the licensor of Fraunhofer’s MP3 codec, Alcatel-Lucent holds two MP3-related patents upheld by a jury yesterday: 5341457 and RE39080. (Neither patent is included in Fraunhofer/Thomson’s suite.)

This confusing state of affairs started in the 1980s, when AT&T’s Bell Labs and Fraunhofer started developing the codec under an agreement that both companies would be able to license aspects of MP3 developed during the collaboration. AT&T spun off Bell Labs as Lucent in 1996; about two years later, Fraunhofer began licensing MP3 technology through Thomson.1

A source close to the matter said when Lucent hit a rough patch financially after the dot-com bubble exploded, the company started looking to its patents as a means of pulling itself back into the black. Microsoft actually commenced the lawsuit that led to Thursday’s verdict when it asked a judge to block Lucent’s patent claims in order to protect its partners Dell and Gateway. After Alcatel bought Lucent last year, some onlookers thought the matter might end there. But Alcatel, sensing that there might be gold in those patents, decided to keep pursuing the suits. Audio is just the beginning; Alcatel-Lucent’s patents for video, speech and user interface are still being contested.

In an e-mail to Wired News, IDC analyst Susan Kevorkian said she believes Alcatel-Lucent may have a legitimate claim to some of the MP3 royalties, but the proper target should be Frauenhofer and not its licensees.

“It looks like there’s a flaw in the way that MP3 technology is being licensed, and that Alcatel-Lucent should have been cut into the licensing revenue from the beginning,” she said. “If this is the case, then the dispute is between Alcatel-Lucent and Fraunhofer (and other contributors to the MP3 patent), and not between Alcatel-Lucent and MP3 licensees, including Microsoft.”

It’s hard to say which companies will be affected by Thursday’s award. Those wishing to use MP3 have traditionally been subject to two sets of rules for using the codec: one for encoding, and another for playback. If the two patents upheld by the jury today apply only to products that encode audio into MP3s, the ruling would affect only companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Yahoo and others offering software that lets consumers make their own MP3 files.

If they cover playback too, every company involved even tangentially with MP3 stands to lose big. Microsoft’s licensing bill for Thomson/Fraunhofer was only $16 million — about 1 percent of what it now owes Alcatel-Lucent. A significant number of the companies who offer MP3 encoders and/or players could face a similar judgment, with many being driven out of business.

Regardless of the ultimate outcome, it’s clear that a cloud of uncertainty now hangs over the MP3 format, and that alone could drive developers and manufacturers to less litigious pastures.

AAC is one potential alternative. The format achieves greater fidelity at higher compression rates than MP3 and has been licensed by Apple for its iTunes music store. Apple wraps AAC is a proprietary digital rights management scheme known as Fairplay that renders it unusable outside Apple’s ecosystem. But AAC itself is an open format based on industry standard MPEG-4 technology. It’s not royalty free, but with standards backing it’s likely the strongest contender for a universal digital audio format.

Microsoft’s Windows Media format similarly offers better performance than MP3 and could also see a boost, though it too includes a digital rights management component that has hampered its acceptance in the market.

One of the most interesting contenders is Ogg Vorbis, an open-source, royalty-free rival to MP3 that also represents a generational improvement in sound quality.

Microsoft has already used it for XBox games (Halo for PC was the first game with 100 percent Ogg Vorbis audio), and considering the way the MP3 licensing structure appears to be crumbling, switching to an open-source codec could start looking like a better idea with each passing day.

Vorbis is not a slam-dunk, however. Notably, its royalty-free claims have not been sanctioned by MP3 patent-holders and companies that adopt it could wind up with exactly the same legal headaches that Microsoft suffered this week over MP3. In fact, despite its longstanding regard among digital music aficionados, Ogg Vorbis has been unable to make serious commercial in-roads.

Some well-known devices and services support Ogg, notably some flash-based and hard-disk portable players from iRiver, but other devices are hampered by the amount of memory available on their DSP chips, and so cannot be upgraded to Ogg, according to Chris Montgomery, the creator of Ogg Vorbis.

Apple’s iPod doesn’t support Ogg now, but according to Montgomery, “ARM-based players like the iPod are ideal for decoding Vorbis.” Apple could add Ogg Vorbis support to the iPod with a simple firmware update. Montgomery also told Wired News that Apple has had “several chances” to add Ogg support, but “passed each time.”

Considering Steve Jobs’ tough talk about getting rid of DRM, perhaps he’d be willing to go one better and switch from AAC to an open-source codec.

Added to the technical and political hurdles are non-technical obstacles to Apple and other manufacturers embracing Ogg Vorbis. Montgomery, who has had a lot of experience trying to convince manufacturers to adopt the codec, said the first problem with Ogg adoption is that “lawyers are paid to say ‘no.’”

The second is that the same patents now being squabbled over by licensors of the MP3 codec could eventually threaten Ogg Vorbis. “To this day, we still have lawyers tell us they won’t support Ogg because Thomson would come after them,” Montgomery said.

Despite these goodies, however, Apple isn’t pushing into corporations with a defined desktop strategy. The company still does not have a formal division focused on developing software for the enterprise or supporting it. And it refused Network World’s requests to discuss its plans for enterprise customers.

Is Mac OS ready for the enterprise? Vote and discuss.

“Because of the switch to Intel, success of the Mac OS X, the stability and elegance of the platform, the Mac is a very viable alternative, but it would require a dramatic shift in the company’s resource allocation to go after the enterprise,” says Van Baker, an analyst with Gartner.

IT shops that have dipped their toes in Apple’s pool of desktop and server platforms say others should test the water.

“Intel Macs have really changed things. Beyond the obvious comparisons — that Macs are now speed-parity with Wintel machines — vendors have been able to develop more software for the platform, and where that is impossible, virtual machines are always an option,” says Scott Melendez, manager of enterprise messaging for the city and county of San Francisco, who brought Macs into governmental offices in 2003 and says they are there to stay alongside Windows machines.

“There will always be a stigma by some old-time network managers — that Macs are difficult to network — from the AppleTalk days, or that they are difficult to support because it’s not Windows. By the end of 2007, however, I think the landscape will have changed,” Melendez says.
It’s a heady prediction, because Mac’s share of the desktop market has been hovering around 4% since 2000 and isn’t expected to change through 2010, IDC says. IDC’s numbers for Mac are worse in the server market, where the Mac OS X Server’s share is well below 1% vs. other options.
Users are helping rock that boat, however.

“We use Mac Xserve and Xserve RAID as the heart of the backup strategy we have throughout the corporation,” says Kevin Hansen, manager of IT for Quadion, which manufacturers rubber and plastic components. Xserve is Apple’s Intel-based storage platform. “All our Windows 2000 and 2003 boxes back up to the Xserve,” he says.

Hansen put the backup infrastructure in place two years ago and since has added an Xserve to back up all the company’s CAD drawings. “It is great for that. It has lots of scalability and terabytes of disk space,” he says.

Others are being drawn in for a peek as they evaluate Microsoft’s Vista client operating system and what it will take to migrate.

“The changes in Vista are significant enough that we think we can absorb the change going to Macs just as easily as going to Vista,” says Tom Gonzales, a senior network administrator for the Colorado State Employees Credit Union in Denver. He says the thought of going to Apple is not as scary as it once was. “If you had asked me two years ago to consider Macs, I would have laughed. But Boot Camp and Parallels, anything we can’t do with our Macs we would be able to run a Windows environment under there,” says Gonzales, who is currently in the Mac evaluation stage.

Boot Camp is coming this spring, in the next version of the Mac operating system code-named Leopard. It lets users install and run Windows XP on their Macs.

Parallels is a company that develops virtualization software for the Mac that lets Windows, open source and Mac operating systems run simultaneously.

That’s the type of innovation that is moving the Mac up the enterprise ladder.

“These capabilities help form a migration strategy,” says Paul Suh, president of ps Enable, a consulting firm that specializes in systems integration and security for the Mac operating system and Mac OS X Server.
“There are lots of enterprise apps written to talk to massive databases or transaction-processing systems that would take years to rewrite. OK, so when you need to talk to those systems, you fire up the virtual machines and use it,” Suh says.
However, Suh, who spent eight years at Apple beginning in the late ’90s, admits it is not a perfect system, given the added support load over a single operating system environment.

The desktop, however, isn’t the only place Apple has features enticing to corporations.

Mac OS X Server provides file and print, cross-platform management, security, and collaboration features, as well as support for POP and IMAP mail, FTP, DNS, and DHCP.

Apple’s Xsan and Xgrid add storage-area networking and clustering options, and the server comes with an unlimited client license for no additional cost.

Apple also has added such open source packages as Apache, Samba, Kerberos, Postfix, Jabber, SpamAssassin and OpenLDAP; and has integrated them in a unified management interface.

OpenLDAP lets the Mac OS X Server plug into Microsoft’s Active Directory and Novell’s eDirectory. The server’s Kerberos infrastructure supports single sign-on, and the platform integrates with NT Domain services, so the server can function as a Primary Domain Controller or Backup Domain Controller in a Windows environment. That configuration lets Windows users authenticate against Mac OS X Server directly from their PC logon.

In Leopard, Apple will add a new iCal server, wiki server, content-searching features and podcast producer as proof that Apple is not playing catch-up but is out in front of the curve on providing social-networking tools.

Despite all those features, there are still some worms at Apple’s core.

The company has no formal support infrastructure that rivals its famous, consumer-support Apple Store Genius Bar; and its selling focus is decidedly in the consumer market.

“To be successful with businesses, they would have to build up an enterprise selling organization if they wanted to gain greater growth in corporate environments,” says Tim Bajarin, an analyst with Creative Strategies.
Others say Apple would need to rely on partnerships to open enterprise doors.
“Intel has a good-sized global sales organization; could Apple do a partnership with Intel? Sure, that is always a possibility,” says Gartner’s Baker.

In the end, some suggest, the big corporate milestone for Apple comes down to getting Mac into the heads and hands of the right people and letting the platform woo converts.

“I guess I still don’t see Mac having crossed the awareness gap,” says ps Enable’s Suh. “It has started to seep into IT consciousness, but there is still a lot of prejudice out there, with some saying Mac is not ready for prime time. Until that awareness gap is closed, then everything else is secondary.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Stocks had their worst day of trading since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks Tuesday, hurtling the Dow Jones industrials down more than 400 points on a worldwide tide of concern that the U.S. and Chinese economies are stumbling and that share prices have become overinflated.

The steepness of the market’s drop, as well as its global breadth, signaled a possible correction after a long period of stable and steadily rising stock markets that had not been shaken by such a volatile day of trading in several years.

A 9 percent slide in Chinese stocks, which came a day after investors sent Shanghai’s benchmark index to a record high close, set the tone for U.S. trading. The Dow began the day falling sharply, and the decline accelerated throughout the course of the session before stocks took a huge plunge in late afternoon as computer-driven sell programs kicked in, and also as a computer glitch caused a delay in the recording of a large number of trades.

The Dow fell 546.02, or 4.3 percent, to 12,086.06 before recovering some ground in the last hour of trading to close down 416.02, or 3.29 percent, at 12,216.24, leaving it in negative territory for the year. Because the worst of the plunge took place after 2:30 p.m., the New York Stock Exchange’s trading limits, designed to halt such precipitous moves, were not activated.

The decline was the Dow’s worst since Sept. 17, 2001, the first trading day after the terror attacks, when the blue chips closed down 684.81, or 7.13 percent.

The drop hit every sector across the market, and a total of $632 billion was lost in total in U.S. stocks on Tuesday, according to Standard & Poor’s Corp. Riskier issues such as small-cap and technology stocks suffered some of the biggest declines, but big industrial companies, those that are often hurt the most in an economic downturn, also were pummeled, with raw materials producers among the hardest hit.

But analysts who have been expecting a pullback after a huge rally that began last October and sent the Dow to a series of record highs, were unfazed by Tuesday’s drop.

“This corrective consolidation phase isn’t just going to be one day, but we don’t believe this is going to be a bear market,” said Bob Doll, BlackRock’s global chief investment officer of equities.

Some investors also tried to put Tuesday’s slide into a longer-term perspective.

“All who invest should feel grateful that we’ve had a great run for the last 12 to 18 months,” said Joel Kleinman, a Washington, D.C. attorney, adding that he has learned to not read too much into any short-term ups and downs. “This is another day in the market.”

Still, traders’ dwindling confidence was knocked down further by data showing that the economy may be decelerating more than anticipated. A Commerce Department report that orders for durable goods in January dropped by the largest amount in three months exacerbated jitters about the direction of the U.S. economy, just a day after former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan said the United States may be headed for a recession.

“It looks more and more like the economy is a slow growth economy,” said Michael Strauss, chief economist at Commonfund. “Moderate economic growth is good - an abrupt stop in economic growth scares people.”

The market had been expecting the government on Wednesday to revise its estimate of fourth-quarter GDP growth down to an annual rate of about 2.3 percent from an initial forecast of 3.5 percent, and grew increasingly nervous on Tuesday that the figure could come in even lower.

The housing market, which the Street had been hoping had bottomed out, also looked far from recovery after a Standard & Poor’s index indicated that single-family home prices across the nation were flat in December. A later report from the National Association of Realtors said existing home sales climbed in January by the largest amount in two years, but the data didn’t erase housing-related concerns, as median home prices fell for a sixth straight month.

But a growing feeling that Wall Street, which has had a big run-up since October, was due for a correction also played into Tuesday’s decline.

“I think that the market was prepared to pull back. The constellation of issues that were worrying the market came to a head,” said Quincy Krosby, chief investment strategist at The Hartford.

Still, the market will need to pull back further before its decline can officially be called a correction, which is considered a 10 percent decline in a bull market. Just a week ago, the Dow had reached new closing and trading highs, rising as high as 12,795.92; it’s now down 4.5 percent from that level.

The Dow’s decline accelerated at a faster than normal pace during the afternoon after a computer glitch kept some trades from being immediately reflected in the index of 30 blue chip stocks. Dow Jones & Co., the media company which manages the flagship index, said the problem occurred after it was discovered computers were not properly calculating trades, prompting a switch to a backup computer.

The result was a massive plunge in the average in the seconds it took Dow Jones to switch to its secondary computers.

The broader Standard & Poor’s 500 index fell 50.33, or 3.47 percent, Tuesday to 1,399.04, and the tech-dominated Nasdaq composite index was off 96.65, or 3.86 percent, at 2,407.87. Both indexes have also turned negative for the year.

The Russell 2000 index of smaller companies dropped 31.03, or 3.77 percent, to 792.66.

A suicide bomber attack on the main U.S. military base in Afghanistan where Vice President Dick Cheney was visiting also rattled the market Tuesday.

China’s stock market plummeted from record highs as investors took profits when concerns arose that the Chinese government may try to temper its ballooning economy by raising interest rates again or reducing more of the money available for lending.

“Corrections usually happen because of a catalyst, and this may be it,” said Ed Peters, chief investment officer at PanAgora Asset Management. “The move in China was a surprise, and when a major market has a shock it ripples through the rest of the market. With all the trade that goes on with China, there tends to be a knee-jerk reaction with that kind of drop.”

The Shanghai Composite Index tumbled 8.8 percent to close at 2,771.79, its biggest decline since it fell 8.9 percent on Feb. 18, 1997. Since Chinese share prices doubled last year as investors poured money into the market after the completion of shareholding reforms, trading in Shanghai has been very volatile.

Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng Index dropped 1.8 percent, and Malaysia’s Kuala Lumpur Composite Index fell 2.8 percent. Japan’s Nikkei stock average fell a more moderate 0.52 percent, but European markets were rattled - Britain’s FTSE 100 lost 2.31 percent, Germany’s DAX index dropped 2.96 percent, and France’s CAC-40 fell 3.02 percent.

Bond prices shot higher as investors bought into the safe-haven Treasury market, pushing the yield on the benchmark 10-year Treasury briefly note down to 4.47 percent, its lowest level so far this year, from 4.63 percent late Monday; the yield settled at 4.52 percent.

The durable goods drop raised the chance of the Federal Reserve easing interest rates later in the year - a possibility that makes the bond market an attractive place to be right now.

The hope for slowing inflation could be dashed, though, if energy costs keep rising. Oil prices initially fell Tuesday on worries that Chinese demand could be dampened should its economy slow down, but later rose on escalating tensions in the Middle East. Light, sweet crude for April delivery added 7 cents to settle at $61.46 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange.

The dollar slipped against other major currencies, while gold also fell.

The Dow has been climbing at a steady rate since last summer, but over the past few trading sessions, stocks began pulling back on the worry that the market is due for a correction.

Data indicating a slower economy had recently been giving stocks a boost on the hopes that the Fed will lower interest rates, which could reinvigorate consumer spending and the struggling housing market. But the market may fall further before that happens, analysts said.

“If in a week or two, the psychology in the U.S. market turns to the realization that we’re in a modest growth economy of 2 to 3 percent growth, that will help temper inflation pressures going forward. If that perception evolves, there’s an increase in the likelihood that the Fed will be lowering rates rather than raising rates. Structurally, it’s a development that should be good for the equity market, but it might be an event that unfolds after prices are lower,” Strauss said.

Declining issues outnumbered advancers by about 7 to 1 on the New York Stock Exchange, where consolidated volume came to 4.56 billion shares, up sharply from 2.82 billion Monday.